


we welcome winter's wind

by triggerswaggiehavoc



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Abstract, Flowers, M/M, Mud, People Change People, Rain, maybe? - Freeform, seasons au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 16:06:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10364319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggerswaggiehavoc/pseuds/triggerswaggiehavoc
Summary: Silver-white winters that melt into springs. Who would love such a thing?降っている雪が雨になる。(Seasons AU)





	

**Author's Note:**

> just a warning this is weird. 2nd chap is snwu

The people in the valley say Winter has a name, one of a different tune, whispering itself on cutting winds and drawing itself in curls of frost on windows, tracing itself over lakes and trapping fish in the freezing water below, howling in storms that beat at the buildings and the people and the land, that bury everything in numb white and wash the world to start anew. The people in the valley say that name is Jihoon, though they don’t dare say so outside small circles around dwindling fires, close links among bodies where the icicles melt too dull to cut them. The people in the valley say Winter is the season of death, of killing, of sickness and sadness. The people in the valley pray for Winter to go.

Jihoon knows the people in the valley are right. He knows he is a monster, an unlovable evil, and he knows he ought to stay away, but how can he? Even the vilest monster imaginable must exist somewhere, and Jihoon can no more leave than the Spring may cease to follow him, mending earthly wounds with bandages of flowers and watering the land with honeyed rain. The people in the valley rejoice at the first sign of Spring, at the first snowflake to warm out of its shape, the first daisy to poke its precious head from beneath the colorless blanket under which it suffocates. How Jihoon so disgustingly envies the Spring.

He sees the Spring sometimes in passing, while he leaves on his dismal march out, fat raindrops falling in a sweet curtain around him, washing out the sleet, the ice. Junhui, he’s called, a handsome name for a handsome season, warm and welcoming, the glittering chimes of life and birth. He bathes in gold all Jihoon dredges in gray and restores each color where it’s bled to the soil, petal by petal by petal. Jihoon hates him, everything about him, to life and to death, to death and beyond.

How could he not, when they are opposites by nature, enemies by design? Why should he bear no resentment toward his perfect contrast, the light which casts him in shadow? He boils with cold rage at the thought of each oncoming Spring, at the sound of it coming from the lips of those in the valley. A single syllable, comforting discord. A hellish heaven to his ears. Wish for your lovely Spring all you like, come his bitter cries each time he hears it, frigid gusts marring all they touch, drawing spears of ice down from the gutters, breaking their own fingers into shards. Pray for him as much as you wish. He will come for you, but you will always meet me first.

Before the arrival of Spring, Jihoon can always feel his approach, a warm sickness in the center of his being. It tells him to go, and go he does, away from the throngs of the people who so hate him, from the graveyard of life he’s razed to the ground. It tells him to flee from his scene of destruction and make way for the savior come to fix all wrongs. He cannot deny the pull within him, the need to depart, nor can he help when the feeling does not reach him in time.

Spring stands before him, shining and golden, steaming Jihoon’s snowflakes to fog as they drop from his palms. He wears a wide smile, too wide, amplified by every icy mirror and packed plane of pure white, aggressive in its brightness. Jihoon can’t stand to look at it, but he is a beautiful season indeed, deserving of every bit of love those in the valley pin to him. Immaculate, gorgeous. Hatefully beautiful.

“You’re early,” Jihoon tells him. The sickness wears at him from the outside now, slowly permeating through his skin, turning his carefully woven ice to careless slush, intricately designed snowflakes to formless mush. Junhui continues smiling, ribbons of green uncurling beneath his feet. Small yellow buds unfold their petals one by one, between his toes and along his calves, and Jihoon despises every one.

“I thought I’d come early.” His voice is breezy and calm, worlds other against Jihoon’s own grating squall. “I wanted to meet you.” Fresh mud clings to the soles of his feet and marks stripes over his knees and elbows, dots the apple of one cheek. Perhaps he’s been hurrying very much, Jihoon thinks.

“Why would you want to meet me?” Jihoon struggles to solidify the mess in his hands, but it only grows closer to water when Junhui takes a step closer, dripping through his fingers in its ruination.

“I’m interested in you,” he confesses, bold grin still present. “I think we could get along.” A pale butterfly flutters to his shoulder and perches there, at ease among the rustling green fabric of his clothing. How positively vile.

“We can’t,” Jihoon tells him, straight and blunt, flattening his hands to the ground and painting one final layer of ice, swirls of frost spreading from his fingertips and racing in every direction. The plants around Junhui’s feet brown when the ice touches them, lose their fragile petals as withered scraps of gray, and it fills Jihoon with some wicked pride, a dark satisfaction. Even the ineffable Spring is not perfect. Junhui frowns when Jihoon rises again to meet his eyes.

“Why not?” His voice is that of every child Jihoon’s heard in this valley, every whining toddler asking why there’s no playing outside under the coat of blizzard beating the aching walls, every snotty kindergartener protesting their extra layers. Because this is how it has to be.

“I hate you,” Jihoon says, brusque, cold. He hopes Junhui feels it dead in his core, a frozen thorn digging without pause, wearing away at the softest part of him. He hopes it stings.

“You hate me?” Light rain falls around him, droplets smattering the ground and his cheeks, washing the crusted mud off his toenails. The flowers round his ankles remain weak and brown, melting into the soil they love so dearly. “Why? Did I hurt you?” Hurt? Hurt is nothing. Hurt is an overstatement, an understatement, a language apart. I have no word, Jihoon thinks, for what your very existence does to me.

“Everything about you is terrible,” Jihoon says. The ground gets more solid the further he walks, frost seeping below the layers of soil Junhui so negligently turned to mud. His skin smooths over with freezing dew, clouds grow cooler as he treads backward, step by step, left and right. “I hate absolutely everything about you,” he continues, chilled breezes refilling his sails, backing his voice with gusto, “and that will never change.” He turns then, throws a final glance over his shoulder at Junhui, still in the midst of a cyan drizzle. “Never come early again.” And then he is gone.

Autumn is a decent season, one Jihoon gets along with just fine—his subtler half, a right-hand man. His name is Wonwoo, and he lingers just a while each time Jihoon arrives to replace him, just long enough to speak a word or two. The people in the valley go mad at the ripples between the cool autumnal air and the brutish wintry chill, but it never prompts Wonwoo to leave. For all the souls Jihoon knows of, Wonwoo is the sole kind enough to like him, the singular he can stand to like in return.

“I heard from Soonyoung,” Wonwoo begins, “that you upset the Spring.” Soonyoung is what they call the Summer. Jihoon has never met him, but he’s certain he’s horrible. How can he be anything but, when so akin to Spring? Rusty leaves flutter around Wonwoo’s feet when he steps forward, drifting in miniature clouds on the subtle winds he stirs. The grass beneath his worn boots is dull green bending slowly toward brown, patient for Jihoon to deliver its final push.

“So what?” Wonwoo sighs, a cautious breeze, brisk and coppery. The wire frames of his glasses shimmer between silver and bronze when he adjusts them on his nose, shaking yellowed leaves from the hair behind his ears and sending them in lazy spirals to join their brethren on the ground. Everything crunches while Wonwoo comes closer, the world but a crumbling shred of paper beneath his feet.

“He did nothing but rain,” Wonwoo tells him. “He washed everything away. The seeds, the flowers.” When he throws his arm at the landscape, it does seem different, like the mountains have shifted closer to the earth. “Everything was turned to mud, and Soonyoung had to fix it. He wasn’t happy.”

“Why should I care how the Summer feels?” Jihoon asks, setting to his tedious task of fashioning snowflakes for the season’s later snowfalls. His back is turned to Wonwoo when he passes by in his departure, but he feels the whirl of dried leaves against his spine all the same.

“You may not,” Wonwoo says, crunch after crunch, each noisy step taking him further away, “but I do.” Jihoon whittles away at his tiny shards of ice, whittles to the tuneless background music of Wonwoo’s fading steps, whittles until he can hear them no longer. When at last he is certain the Autumn has left, he freezes the ground and kills the grass.

Who cares if the Spring ruins everything, he grumbles, chipping angrily at the flecks of ice piling in his palm. Who cares if he’s turned all the world to mud and washed it to oblivion? Does it make a difference? The people will love him even as they starve in want of the vegetables he’s rained to death, even as their houses crumble over the mudslides he’s crafted. They will love him so long as he follows Jihoon, even if Jihoon paints ivory over their all with greatest delicacy, allows every snowfall to find its gentle way to peaceful drifts along the slushy riverbank. They will love him hideously no matter what, so Jihoon will do as he always has and rend every breath of life from the jaws of the valley, leave nothing in his wake. If your repulsive loyalty is worth anything, he tells them through blinding sideways streaks of ice, I will do you the favor of testing it.

He feels the wobbling illness in his core four days before the Spring arrives, trudges in with heavy steps. As always, his shoeless feet are caked with mud, skin glowing a coppery gold through the translucent sheets of misted rain shrouding him. His eyes find Jihoon from a cautious distance and smile, but his mouth does not join them. Jihoon watches the snow at his feet melt to sludge, the grass regain its palest greens, eager worms wiggle their heads out from beneath the dirt. Detestable.

“Spring.” The howl of his voice sounds so foreign to him, so surprising where he meant to say nothing. The Spring’s eyes widen, and he takes a few tremulous steps closer. Don’t come near, Jihoon wants to scream. He watches white fade to brown, snow turn to rain, trees earn back their leaves. Stay as far from me as possible. “Do you know why I hate you?”

“Because I’m terrible,” he groans in response. A white butterfly beats its wings to sit upon his windswept hair, melted in the middle of brown and shining blonde. “Because everything about me is terrible.” The blue sky sighs around him, white blanket of clouds dyeing nearer to ash. Don’t pity yourself, you hateful thing. Don’t pity yourself when they love you so.

“Yes,” Jihoon tells him. “Because you’re terrible in every way.” The last of his so meticulously carved snowflakes dive from his palms to the ground below, warming bit by bit until they lose their perfect structure and hit the earth as formless drops of rain. “Yet the people in this valley still love you.” He throws bitter words over his shoulder, less fragile than his snowflakes, more likely to melt. “At least deserve it.” Junhui watches him go with an odd look on his face, confusion thick in his eyes, but Jihoon does not turn around to see it.

When next Jihoon meets the Spring, he feels sick all over, an eking, bleeding illness in his every nerve, strong enough to be noticed but too weak to hinder. He scans the landscape for its cause and locks on a dot far in the distance, glowing brown, beset by dewy fog. A miniscule arm waves with vigor, gleeful arcs over a head Jihoon is certain wears an irritating grin.

“What are you doing here?” Jihoon howls at him, dumping another snowbank at the roadside. He watches the ground for any change—cracking ice, tender blades of grass springing forth, brownish stains of mud—but it remains impossibly the same, miraculously still. Jihoon narrows his eyes. “I told you not to come early again,” he wails over his own shrieking winds. How foolish I was to think you might listen.

“I’ve not come yet,” Junhui hollers back, dancing in place. He jabs his tiny arm at his tinier feet, shows a few tiny stomps to prove it. “See how far I’m standing!” What’s he proving by standing off so very far?

“But why?” Jihoon squints through his own flurries at the Spring to make sure he does not approach. “Why are you standing there?”

“I want to talk to you!” Junhui yells. “I don’t think you hate me after all.” In his surprise, Jihoon halts everything. Winds grow quiet, snowfalls die, icicles dangle eternally in their downward drip. All is still when Jihoon looks across a wide blanket of crisp white and somehow finds Junhui’s shining eyes, impossibly small though they are. Perfect amber crystals, the budding honey of springtime. They twinkle back at him like enemies.

“I’ve told you already that I hate you,” Jihoon shouts. It fractures in the emptiness, splinters into an infinity of soundless shards and falls invisible to join the snow.

“I know that,” Junhui replies, clear and shining and much too cheerful. “But I think you didn’t really mean it.”

“What makes you think so?” It isn’t loud enough to be heard, but Junhui still answers.

“You told me to deserve love from this valley,” he calls. “Was it because I muddied everything up last time? I didn’t do it again.” His distant frame shakes with energy, so eager to move forward, but move it does not. Jihoon doesn’t trust his stillness. “You care about these people, don’t you? You’re not as harsh as you let on.” Jihoon’s jaw clenches, tight enough to grind his teeth to dust, to weather his skull to meal.

“What do you know?” he roars. “What do you know about me?” Stagnant snow around his feet whips itself into a vicious cyclone of pallor, violent and unforgiving, battering the walls of every house, thrashing the feeble branches of every dormant tree. He rips them from the ground, tears their roots from the soil and smashes them across roads and into powerlines, beyond hope of seeing the leaves Junhui would have brought them. Is this harsh enough? His very bones ache to ask. I will show you the meaning of harsh.

“What are you doing?” Junhui yelps. Lashes of ice draw an uncrossable line before him.

“You don’t know anything,” Jihoon spits over his chaos. He marches toward Junhui and leaves it all behind him, a mess to be cleaned by warm spring rains and twisting chartreuse stems. Every step brings a new layer of sickness, a new earthy grime on his skin, but he must continue. “Just as much as the people in this valley hate me, I hate them.” He continues until he’s at Junhui’s feet, toe to toe, looking up into those loathsome eyes. “Just as much as they love you, I hate you.” They stand silent for too long, until Jihoon can feel his stomach start to churn and bile sear the back of his throat. “Don’t misunderstand my criticism for care.” When he stalks away, he can still feel Junhui’s eyes on him. Every step is medicine.

Wonwoo eyes him carefully when next he arrives, dusty umber leaves shaking free from his hair and settling in a comfortless quilt to be crunched beneath the thick soles of boots he’s worn forever. Jihoon crushes the leaves under his own heavy galoshes while he walks up. The air isn’t quite as cool as he’s used to Wonwoo leaving it, and it puts pressure inside his lungs, something trying to force its way out from the center of his chest. It drives him restless alongside the leaves skipping carefree on lethargic breezes.

“Why do you always do this to the Spring?” he asks. For once, Jihoon wishes he would just leave him be as the rest of the world does.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jihoon answers him. Wonwoo sighs a great, brisk sigh, knocks the last few reddened leaves off the final tree with a tap of his fist, buries them in an army of friends alike. What beautiful work, Jihoon thinks. How soothing it must be to coat the ground in shades of orange rather than shell it in white.

“You do know what I mean.” He removes his round spectacles and polishes one lens on the fading brown knit of his sweater, measured circles until it’s perfectly clear again. “You resent him. I understand.” With bony fingers, he dusts the rest of the leaves hanging off his clothes to the ground, pours a smattering of cool raindrops over them for good measure. “But it’s not his fault.”

“Whose is it, then, if not his?”

“Nobody’s,” Wonwoo tells him. The sky drops from gold to gray while he walks off in backwards step, each softer than the last. “He does not command the people to hate you any more than you command them to love him.” Wonwoo fades away slowly, a shroud of burning red. Somehow, Jihoon has no energy to mold his precious snowflakes.

Should he just accept that, then? Should he just accept that he deserves to be hated, that the Spring deserves to be loved? Should he accept that there’s no change to be had and no fingers to point? And that’s all there is to it? How can he accept that he is so worthy of hate beside one so worthy of love without animosity? He can’t, and he won’t. Not even when every bit of ground on this earth has thawed to mud. Not even when every smear of mud has washed clear to bedrock.

Again this time, Junhui stands far away when he comes, too far to see and too close to ignore. Even when Jihoon spots him, he still feels well somehow, like his pristine winter could continue indefinitely. It’s horridly uncomfortable. “You’re here again,” Jihoon calls to him, weary. As the years draw on, he grows more tired. His palms empty of their crystals, but he doesn’t feel it. “Why do you always come?”

“Because I have to,” Junhui bellows from afar. Jihoon knows it. He knows it and he knows it no matter how much he wishes he wouldn’t. “I want to apologize to you.” Jihoon peers at him while he dusts his hands of their frosty burden, unsure whether to trust his words, and watches the snow pile up against house walls until their windows are obscured.

“For what?” You could not know what to apologize for, Jihoon thinks, when you have done nothing. You could not know what to apologize for when I do not know why I want you to apologize.

“For whatever I’ve done to you,” Junhui states, firm and foolish. “I may not know what it is, but I’m sorry, and I’d like to stop it if you’ll tell me how.”

“You’d like to stop it?” Jihoon barks. Gone are the rooves when he paints them a glossy milk, a flawless picture of nothingness. Gone are the steps he takes when they fill back in just as quickly with snow, an endless landscape without imprint or life. Gone is everything when Jihoon touches it, dead and empty. He clears the world of all that makes it beautiful, polishes it clean to start again from a blank slate of destruction, and that is why he must be hated. “You would stop existing as an apology to me?”

“Stop existing?” Junhui cries. “You want me to stop existing?”

“There’s nothing I’d like more,” Jihoon sighs, throwing an arm at the colorless world before him, between them. Junhui stares back over the yawning stretch of ground separating them, no more than a miniscule silhouette in the distance far removed. “It’s because of you they hate me so.”

“Because of me?” His words carry like the birds he sends to build their nests, small and bright and hard to ignore. From so far, Jihoon has no hope of telling the expression on his face. Keep your regretful voice, he wants to scream. Keep it all when you hold no regret.

“It’s all because of you,” Jihoon tells him. It’s not his fault, Wonwoo’s voice echoes in his mind. It’s nobody’s fault. But it is still because of this wretched Spring. “You return to life everything I can do nothing but kill. You melt all I freeze and unearth all I bury. They hate me because of you. Because they compare me to you.” Snow falls soft around him, quiet in its sloth. Jihoon has forgotten the snow may be so gentle. “If you were not all that is beauty and life, they would not see that I am ugliness and death.”

“I didn’t ask to be this,” Junhui explains. He takes one step forward, toes nudging at the edges of even snow Jihoon’s laid down.

“Nor would you ask to be different,” Jihoon returns. Fat flakes land all over his hands and lashes, and for the first time, he can feel how very cold they are. From all this way away, it’s difficult to discern whether Junhui is stationary or approaching, but Jihoon can feel each muddy footstep in the space between his lungs. “Nobody would choose to be as despised as I am.”

“They don’t hate you,” Junhui says to him as if he knows anything. Certainly he is closer, certainly still coming, and it cannot be explained why Jihoon feels no illness.

“How could you know?” Jihoon scoffs. “You only see them happy. I hear everything they say.”

“And I hear nothing?” Junhui stops, and he is close, so close, but the ground beneath him is still hard, Jihoon’s stomach still settled. He glows perfect gold, brown twists of hair dripping with fresh dew. “When it rains, they mourn the snow. When the mosquitoes return, they mourn their absence.” Small leaves curl from the fabric of his shirt, with neither thorns nor threat. The smallest flower grows five white petals below his collarbone, no larger than a snowflake. “They love you very quietly.”

“They never say those things when I’m here.” Puffs of breath off Junhui’s lips condense on the air and turn to fog that falls to the houses below. “You don’t hear how they hate me.”

“You don’t hear how they love you.” A puddle gathers gradually in the prints of Junhui’s feet, cleaning mud from between his blued toes. “When the Summer comes, they pine for your return.” His smile is a wide crescent, white like all Jihoon knows and warm like all he doesn’t, an enigmatic opposite of itself. “It’s who they are to want everything they don’t have.”

“Do they hate you, then?”

“They hate my rain and my mud, my insects and my weeds,” he discloses. Carnations bud between his knuckles, white and pink and gentle red. “But they still love me, just as they love you.” He extends his hand, tips soft petals from his palm to the wet cloth of snow below. Few sink into the lake forming about his ankles. “Just as I also love you.” Jihoon’s eyes blow wide, wide enough to stop the snow falling where it sits in the air. All he can see is the hand outstretched before him, the glimmering chestnut eyes beyond.

“You love me?” he asks. “But I hate you.”

“You might,” Junhui concedes, “but how can I not love you, when everything I do is possible because of what you do for me?” In his tiny swamp, small stalks sprout where the snow has faded fully to soil, miniature grasses bending in the subtle flow of the water. “You drive out the life so I can create more. You cleanse the earth so I can decorate it again. If not for you, I could do none of the things they love me for.” His smile brightens impossibly. “Spring is not Spring if Winter does not come before, and I am nothing without you. I can never love myself without loving you first.”

“And do you love yourself?”

“Very much.” He wiggles his fingers expectantly. “Do you still hate me?”

“Yes,” Jihoon breathes. Junhui’s grin is sad, but not hopeless. When he grips Jihoon’s hand, it feels like the melting sludge in every gutter in the valley; even so, Jihoon cannot bring himself to let go. What an awful, incomprehensible feeling.

“Before you leave, wait where I was standing.” He nods his head toward the edge of the snow, the end of a trail of dirty footsteps. “You will see.”

Jihoon trudges alongside the path, pressing heavy dents beside each muddy track while Junhui melts his work away from the center. When he reaches Junhui’s former post, he contemplates marching on, but something compels him to stay, so stay he does. He turns around and watches the Spring wash every fleck of snow away with warm rains, sprout vibrant stripes of green over the bare earth and dye all the world back to its rainbow of hues. Butterflies bat their pastel wings as they flit before his eyes, lazy paths to newborn blossoms littering the ground.

The people come slowly out of their houses, waddling in rain boots, splashing through puddles. Children squat and chase fluorescent frogs down the mucky sidewalks, staining their scrawny legs an unbecoming brown. Jihoon hears it. “I miss the snow,” a mother laments, squelching behind her young son. “Snow angels never make any mess.”

“Damn this humidity,” whines the boy delivering newspapers, wheel of his bicycle caught in a sticky patch of mud. He fans at his dewy face with an undelivered paper, tugs at the pale blue shirt sticking to his chest. “I never sweat like this in winter.” A moment later, he swats at his arm. “And these stupid bugs!” Jihoon huffs and turns on his heel. How ungrateful they are for the beauty of the Spring.

“Winter,” comes a voice from behind him, rumbling loud over the showers. Jihoon turns, and even from this distance, he can spy Junhui’s smile. “Have you ever tried a strawberry before?”

“Of course not,” Jihoon shouts back. “When would I have?”

“Right.” Junhui grins and pours water to the land from between cracks in his fingers, draws delicate mosses over walls of brick. “I’ll save you one. You will see how nice Spring can be.” Jihoon turns and walks away without answering. A small smile blooms on his lips the farther he retreats.

Surely as the sun sets each evening and rises each morn, Wonwoo holds a carefully wrapped parcel in hand when Jihoon arrives to greet him, brown paper tied with thick string. “Give me your hand,” he says when Jihoon slides up to him, drawing tendrils of frost on the piled up leaves underfoot. Jihoon does as he’s told and holds his palm up, patient, waiting. The package is cool when it touches his skin.

“What’s in it?” Jihoon asks, toying with the string. “Is it a strawberry?”

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo admits. “Soonyoung told me to give it to you. The Spring told him to keep it safe.”

“Do you do everything the Summer asks you to do without question?”

“I do,” Wonwoo tells him. He jerks his chin at the little bundle. “Don’t let that freeze. We’ve worked all year to give it to you.” A final leaf floats to the ground, and he is gone.

The second Wonwoo is out of sight, Jihoon tugs the knot loose and unfolds the thick paper. In the center of the sheet sit three strawberries, bright red and plump, overrun with seeds. Jihoon’s never seen them before now that he thinks of it, and he hasn’t the faintest clue how they taste, but he lifts one and pinches it gingerly between his teeth.

Sweet. The only word his mind conjures is sweet, and it is certainly the most fitting. Its inside is a subtle tie dye, a gradient of white and pink and vibrant scarlet, and Jihoon eats the rest of it without thinking, juice dribbling past his lips and onto his chin. He finishes the other two just as quickly and wipes his face with the end of his sleeve, crumbles the paper and stuffs it into his pocket. So this, he thinks, is what the Spring tastes like. So this is why they love the Spring.

When he senses his time for the annum is lapsing to its end, he spots Junhui in his periphery, distant as the few times previous. Jihoon looks at him head-on while he smooths the ice over a small lake. Children skate onto it with trepidation, blades etching uneven curls on the smooth plane. Mothers watch from the side of the pond, nervous frowns hidden by thick scarves. Jihoon lets the snow hit them softly.

“Winter,” Junhui calls. “Did you get to eat the strawberries?”

“I did,” he answers. Junhui wiggles in his spot, eager to move but too scared to try. “Spring.” His attention is grabbed immediately, spine rigid within an instant. “Have you ever made a snow angel?”

“I haven’t.” Of course you haven’t, Jihoon thinks. I would never let you ruin my hard work with your disgusting footsteps.

“If you promise not to melt anything,” Jihoon begins, sweeping his arm at the unmarred plains, “you may come make one.”

“I’ll try my best,” Junhui answers, tiptoeing with utmost care through the frozen landscape. When at last he arrives, his toes are frosted, teeth gritted in focus, brow furrowed. He looks at Jihoon with a hesitant turn of his head, eyes steel. “What do I do?”

“Lie down.” Junhui does as he is told, presses his back flat to the snow with a rolling shiver that quakes his whole being. “Spread your arms.” He does. “Wave them like this and move your legs.” After Junhui is satisfied with his effort, he stands again to admire his handiwork. The whistle slipping between his teeth sounds like birdsong.

“It’s nice,” he says. “But so cold.” His eyes find Jihoon’s again, warmth encapsulated. Jihoon is unlearning his resentment, atom by atom. He starts with the eyes. “Did you like the strawberries?”

“They were delicious.”

“Weren’t they?” He blows out a breath, neither warm nor cold. The sick feeling Jihoon used to get is but a distant memory now, foggy like the mists dancing around Junhui’s ears. How strange it is to change. “They can grow because of the rest you give the soil. They’re good because of you.” He levels his gaze. “Do you still hate me?”

“You want me to say no,” Jihoon ventures.

“Very much.”

“Not yet, Spring.” Junhui frowns. A small bird on his shoulder nuzzles its feathered head into his jaw.

“If it’s all the same to you, would you call me Junhui instead of Spring?”

Jihoon searches him through the veil of softly falling snow, through the fine mist enveloping him. He surveys the angel he’s left on the ground and the snow piled at his muddy feet, straining not to melt. “Fine,” he concedes at last. “I will. You may call me Jihoon instead of Winter.”

“Jihoon,” he hums, and it has never sounded so warm in all its years, never sounded so akin to love. Atom by atom is so very slow to unlearn resentment. Jihoon does not, cannot say it now: this is where his hate dies.

Subsequent years see a shift in the valley. Winters are mild and long, reach their frozen fingers into drippy springs that begin with slushy mud and end with burgeoning gardens, overfilled flowerbeds. The people in the valley groan at the fickle weather, the raindrops that freeze just before hitting the pavement, the grasses which wilt and revive within the week. They yearn for the time when the seasons were separate, cleanly cut and wholly divided, beings of their own without the nerve to touch. As always, they wish for what they do not have.

In a time that should certainly be Spring, Jihoon finds himself still around, still cooling occasional dews to frosts and warping rains to sleets and slush, chilling the children who play on their newly snowless lawns. Junhui looks beautiful when vines spill over his shoulders, innocent flowers in shades of blue budding in long rows atop them. The butterflies clinging to his chest do not stir when he approaches Jihoon, nor when Jihoon dots frost on his knuckles, on those crawling vines.

“Jihoon,” he says.

“Yes?”

“Do you still hate me?”

What a foolish question, Jihoon thinks. Would I linger so if I hated you? Wind sifts through his hair, wears at his shoulders, and he knows he must go soon, but he still does not leave. I have long since ceased hating you, he thinks. A daring butterfly drifts close by his nose, yellow wings beating a furious tempo. I have never hated you.

“No,” he answers.

“Do you love me?”

You truly are a fool to ask such a thing. Does the planet turn? Does the sun rise? Do stars burn eternal in galaxies so far away? I can no longer exist without loving you.

“As the land loves the sea,” Jihoon tells him. “There can be no Winter without Spring to follow.” It means yes.

Junhui’s eyes crinkle above a grin. He leans in close, and for no more than a second, they are connected. He is the strawberries he tends, the flowers he grows, the rain he brings. He is at once all of it in one and an entity separate altogether. He is the Spring and Jihoon is the Winter, and they are the greatest difference ever to touch. They are everything together and nothing alone. Jihoon turns and takes his leave, struts proudly off past the mountains, eager already for Spring’s next arrival. The flavor of strawberries haunts his tongue.

The people in the valley say there is a name for the bizarre way the weather behaves at the advent of Spring, the precipitation’s confusion over whether it will fall as snow or rain, whether it shall turn to fog or sleet. Jihoon has never heard the name, grumbled under the breath of every stodgy old man lugging an umbrella in his bag while he wears winter boots, muttered irately over every cup of coffee at each crowded café between these mountains. He needs to hear that name no more than he needs to build new gardens beneath his snowfall, for he knows very well himself a name that fits, a single syllable to explain the senseless changes. Who should know better than he?

It is no secret that without Winter, there can be no Spring. What word can explain such an existence if not love?

**Author's Note:**

> hooooooooooooowdy folks. i wrote most of this today also it's 3am pardon the mistakes u see im tired and i wanted it out there. as i mentioned it's kinda bizarre and suuuuuuuper diff from shit i write usually but i hope u manage to like it anyway. this is the first half of a 96z 2-shot, w the next half being soonwoo, so hopefully that doesn't take 9 years for me to churn out. shoutout to the kanto song that woozi featured in for being my soundtrack while writing this and thus my unofficial sponsor. what the fuck else do u say in author's notes i'm so goddamn tired  
> thank u for reading for real. i truly truly hope u enjoyed. as always, feedback is greatly appreciated! later


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